JavATE 0.5 New Features

Entity Groups

There are situations where makes sense accessing entities grouped in some way.

For example we could group persons by birth year.

In these cases we can use the new DominATE EntityGroup class. Objects of this class represents groups of entities that share the fact of satisfying a specification.

Group Browser

To navigate through a set of entity groups and their members there is the new ApplicATE GroupBrowser. You can also select entities in a group or an entire group.

Group browsers are supported in GuidATE by the new groupBrowserListbox custom component.

Property availability and writability

Now you can dynamically specify if a property is available or writable adding to a bean a method called "isPropertyNameWritable" or "isPropertyNameAvailable" where PropertyName must be replaced with the name of the property you are controlling.

This method must return a boolean: true if the property is available/writable, false otherwise.

GuidATE will use this methods, if they are present. If a property is not available the corresponding GuidATE features (propertyValue, textProperty, listProperty, etc.) will be hidden. If a property is not writable the corresponding GuidATE features will be read-only.

Resettable commands

Prior to version 0.5, an ApplicATE command cannot be reused after it has been executed. Now commands can implement the Resettable interface so they can be resetted calling the reset() method after the doCommand(). In the reset() method you can implement the code you need to make the command available for another execution.

TransactionalCommandContext is aware of this new method so it can reset the underlying session to your persistence management service.

Lazy entities and collections

DominATE has pre-built support for Hibernate persisted entities, but developers can develop new repositories for accessing other kinds of data stores. To simplify the development of lazy-loaded entities and collections of entities DominATE now has the new LazyEntity and LazyList classes.